June 5, 2009

Finally, we are on the itinerary for the "tourist" part of the trip. And the first thing Ray noticed that it was going to take us 7 hours to go from Dar to Lake Manyara, and it was only about 300 miles. But we headed off for the Dar airport (in Dar the cabs have enough gas to get you to your destination). It was a 9 am flight so we left at 7 am from the hotel. The flight was Coastal Air. We got on the flight and the plane held about 20 people, you sat where you sat and stored your luggage at the back of the plane. We had been warned to travel light, each person could carry a maximum of 30 lbs on these internal flights, so a carry on was all we took for our 16 day trip.

The reason the flight took so long was that before heading west, we flew first to Zanzibar, then to Arusha and then to Lake Manyara. It was a little nerve racking, all the up and down, but these are true bush airlines, and for some reason this fills the flights! Not only that, we discovered on these flights that the preferred seat is the co-pilot seat. On one of the flights as soon as we got up to cruising height the pilot started texting on his phone, and did not look up again until it was time to land. On the way home we saw the pilot bargaining with a manager about the price of fuel. The bargaining took so long that the flight was delayed, and finally the pilot payed for the fuel in US dollars. This culture makes it easy to understand why running out of fuel on these short hops is a real danger, and indeed the boys heard of a flight near Kilimanjaro that had run out of fuel two years ago, all passengers had died.

When we stepped off the flight in Lake Manyara we were met by two soldiers with rifles slung over their shoulders and our guide, Modi. Modi was quite reserved and very professional. He took us first to a road house to eat our box lunches, and then to Lake Manyara National Park for our first game drive. It was amazing.